5 ms·

Kind of sounds like a frat hazing ritual but for some unimaginably complex cryptograhpic scheme. Nothing will go wrong though of course!

mptest 3y ago
I haven't kept up with the space in some time but if this is what I'm remembering, all that's needed is one participant in the ceremony to keep their secret forever/"lose" it for the security to be guaranteed. That's why as many participants as possible is a good thing. all that said I'm a student/layman and not an expert in anything
- quickthrower2 3y ago
  What makes me think it is complicated is that a hash to all zeros would do this sort of a job, as no one could reverse this and find a key that would map to it. So whatever they are doing doesn’t have a natural “nothing up my sleeve” number and needs a social construct like this.
  - mptest 3y ago
    If I'm understanding you correctly, you're saying they don't need the social ceremony where everyone adds obfuscation, because there is some simple way for one user to derive the same security? Does that not rely on us all trusting that initial user who "hashes to all zeroes" to maintain the secret? The goal here is not only to establish security but security anyone can participate in to add security, such that everyone trusts it, because anyone could have participated. Even if that's more complicated, it's more trustworthy. Again though, I am not an expert in anything, I'm a student of computer science. I may be completely misunderstanding you and if I am, I apologize. It could be said though the social construct/contract is kind of the whole point of the decentralized protocols
    - quickthrower2 3y ago
      Like you I am no expert. What I mean is you can construct a challenge that is provably very hard, such as a hash input that produces zeros (translates to near infinite compute power in terms of mining, or some mathematical or quantum computing breakthrough that renders modern cryptography useless then this Ethereum thing is the least of your worries).
      - deleted 3y ago
        [deleted]
      - rrobukef 3y ago
        They don't need one number, they need two (or more) that are related in such a way they have cryptographic properties. And the math says to derive them from a seed. However the seed must be secret because it's a back-door. Luckily everybody can generate their own seed and their contributions can be combined without knowing the seeds. All zeros won't work because they don't have the properties.
- robocat 3y ago
  From FAQ further down the page: What needs to go wrong for the safety of the Ceremony to break? The ceremony has a "1-of-N" trust assumption, which means that only a single participant in the entire ceremony needs to destroy or otherwise forget their secret input for everything to be secure. To break the Ceremony output, every participant would have to strip apart the software that they are using to contribute, get that software to give them the secret, and then collude with every single other participant to reconstruct the final secret. A more realistic failure mode is a common bug which leaks the randomness. To combat this, this site has been audited and there are alternative implementations of the contribution software built on entirely different software stacks. This is why there will be thousands of participants using different pieces of software on different operating systems to help prevent single points of failure both in the people and hardware/software.
latchkey 3y ago
> Nothing will go wrong though of course! At this point, I'm willing to give the Ethereum developers the benefit of the doubt. They've really knocked some major features out of the park over the last few years. Namely, they switched the entire consensus model out, while the plane was flying full of people and that went off pretty much without a hitch. Don't forget that this also had the side effect of significantly cutting power usage not only for ETH, but also for every single other GPU mined PoW chain out there. So yea... they made something creative out of the process of the next round of improvements, and invited you to join. Seems cool to me.
- littlestymaar 3y ago
  > At this point, I'm willing to give the Ethereum developers the benefit of the doubt. Accidental* crypto developer here. The most consistent behavior from Ethereum developers is designing “clever home-brewed mechanisms” because they are ”very smart”, and then it turns out this is yet another dirty hack that'll need more dirty hacks in the future to circumvent all its flaws. It's 2023, stop giving the benefit of the doubt to arrogant cranks that have consistently proven over almost a decade that they really are arrogant cranks. [*]gotta pay the bills…
  - pa7x1 3y ago
    Could you provide examples of previously deployed dirty hacks that need more dirty hacks to circumvent the flaws?
    - littlestymaar 3y ago
      Well, the entirety of the “Web3” API is a pile of hacks, but my “favorite” is probably eip-1559 (and not for the “political” reasons, like “make eth deflationary”, it's just very annoying to work with).
      - pa7x1 3y ago
        This is like complaining about the HTTP protocol because you don't like the requests Python library. There is no "Web3" API as part of the Ethereum protocol. "Web3" APIs (in plural because there are multiple ones, in different programming languages) are externally built libraries that expose in an API details about the Ethereum blockchain (blocks, transactions, gas consumed in a block, base fee, etc...). If you don't like a particular library, you can use a different one, or build your own. EIP-1559 has never been patched. It's still functioning as it was conceived. A minor clarification is that it was not introduced to make ETH deflationary, and in fact, it doesn't guarantee in any way that it will be deflationary. It's a side effect of demand for settling on Ethereum exceeding the current issuance of ETH. In much the same way the supply of oil may go down if demand for it is greater than its production. In what ways is it annoying to work with EIP-1559? It's, I would argue, much simpler than it was in the past, as you now have a pre-defined base fee to pay to be included in a block. But perhaps you have something else in mind.

mptest 3y ago

I haven't kept up with the space in some time but if this is what I'm remembering, all that's needed is one participant in the ceremony to keep their secret forever/"lose" it for the security to be guaranteed. That's why as many participants as possible is a good thing. all that said I'm a student/layman and not an expert in anything

quickthrower2 3y ago
What makes me think it is complicated is that a hash to all zeros would do this sort of a job, as no one could reverse this and find a key that would map to it. So whatever they are doing doesn’t have a natural “nothing up my sleeve” number and needs a social construct like this.
- mptest 3y ago
  If I'm understanding you correctly, you're saying they don't need the social ceremony where everyone adds obfuscation, because there is some simple way for one user to derive the same security? Does that not rely on us all trusting that initial user who "hashes to all zeroes" to maintain the secret? The goal here is not only to establish security but security anyone can participate in to add security, such that everyone trusts it, because anyone could have participated. Even if that's more complicated, it's more trustworthy. Again though, I am not an expert in anything, I'm a student of computer science. I may be completely misunderstanding you and if I am, I apologize. It could be said though the social construct/contract is kind of the whole point of the decentralized protocols
  - quickthrower2 3y ago
    Like you I am no expert. What I mean is you can construct a challenge that is provably very hard, such as a hash input that produces zeros (translates to near infinite compute power in terms of mining, or some mathematical or quantum computing breakthrough that renders modern cryptography useless then this Ethereum thing is the least of your worries).
    - deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
    - rrobukef 3y ago
      They don't need one number, they need two (or more) that are related in such a way they have cryptographic properties. And the math says to derive them from a seed. However the seed must be secret because it's a back-door. Luckily everybody can generate their own seed and their contributions can be combined without knowing the seeds. All zeros won't work because they don't have the properties.
robocat 3y ago
From FAQ further down the page: What needs to go wrong for the safety of the Ceremony to break? The ceremony has a "1-of-N" trust assumption, which means that only a single participant in the entire ceremony needs to destroy or otherwise forget their secret input for everything to be secure. To break the Ceremony output, every participant would have to strip apart the software that they are using to contribute, get that software to give them the secret, and then collude with every single other participant to reconstruct the final secret. A more realistic failure mode is a common bug which leaks the randomness. To combat this, this site has been audited and there are alternative implementations of the contribution software built on entirely different software stacks. This is why there will be thousands of participants using different pieces of software on different operating systems to help prevent single points of failure both in the people and hardware/software.

latchkey 3y ago

> Nothing will go wrong though of course! At this point, I'm willing to give the Ethereum developers the benefit of the doubt. They've really knocked some major features out of the park over the last few years. Namely, they switched the entire consensus model out, while the plane was flying full of people and that went off pretty much without a hitch. Don't forget that this also had the side effect of significantly cutting power usage not only for ETH, but also for every single other GPU mined PoW chain out there. So yea... they made something creative out of the process of the next round of improvements, and invited you to join. Seems cool to me.

littlestymaar 3y ago
> At this point, I'm willing to give the Ethereum developers the benefit of the doubt. Accidental* crypto developer here. The most consistent behavior from Ethereum developers is designing “clever home-brewed mechanisms” because they are ”very smart”, and then it turns out this is yet another dirty hack that'll need more dirty hacks in the future to circumvent all its flaws. It's 2023, stop giving the benefit of the doubt to arrogant cranks that have consistently proven over almost a decade that they really are arrogant cranks. [*]gotta pay the bills…
- pa7x1 3y ago
  Could you provide examples of previously deployed dirty hacks that need more dirty hacks to circumvent the flaws?
  - littlestymaar 3y ago
    Well, the entirety of the “Web3” API is a pile of hacks, but my “favorite” is probably eip-1559 (and not for the “political” reasons, like “make eth deflationary”, it's just very annoying to work with).
    - pa7x1 3y ago
      This is like complaining about the HTTP protocol because you don't like the requests Python library. There is no "Web3" API as part of the Ethereum protocol. "Web3" APIs (in plural because there are multiple ones, in different programming languages) are externally built libraries that expose in an API details about the Ethereum blockchain (blocks, transactions, gas consumed in a block, base fee, etc...). If you don't like a particular library, you can use a different one, or build your own. EIP-1559 has never been patched. It's still functioning as it was conceived. A minor clarification is that it was not introduced to make ETH deflationary, and in fact, it doesn't guarantee in any way that it will be deflationary. It's a side effect of demand for settling on Ethereum exceeding the current issuance of ETH. In much the same way the supply of oil may go down if demand for it is greater than its production. In what ways is it annoying to work with EIP-1559? It's, I would argue, much simpler than it was in the past, as you now have a pre-defined base fee to pay to be included in a block. But perhaps you have something else in mind.